Jared Kristensen and the price of an empty room

The first show sold out. For a young promoter, that is a persuasive introduction to business: book the act, open the doors, watch people arrive. Jared Kristensen began promoting in 2009, and his first event featured The Bloody Beetroots. Then came a second event and a $20,000 loss. A room can have excellent lighting and still deliver a rather dark financial statement. ↗

That loss became the starting point for Audience Republic, the company he co-founded to help event organisers sell tickets. It also gives his career an unusually clear organising question. What happens before the doors open? By the time a fan reaches the venue, most of the promoter’s commercial decisions have already been made. The costly uncertainty belongs to the weeks and months beforehand. ↗

Today, Kristensen has moved on from Audience Republic. His public profile identifies him as CEO and founder of Neuma, following the sale of his previous company. The new chapter sits beside a long apprenticeship in understanding audiences: first through live shows, then through marketing software, and eventually through the work of selling that software to other people. ↗

Before the spreadsheet, the lighting rig

At fifteen, Kristensen was pushing boxes and setting up lighting equipment for events including Big Day Out and Red Hot Chili Peppers shows. By eighteen, he was running his own company and producing electronic music events with acts such as Boys Noize and MSTRKRFT. His introduction to the industry took place among the practical jobs that make somebody else’s glamorous evening possible. ↗

His career subsequently crossed into digital production and startup marketing. He worked at Jack Morton Worldwide, then held marketing roles at OneSaas and Flamingo. He studied at the University of Auckland, with a Bachelor of Commerce in marketing and commercial law. The combination is apt: entertainment needs imagination, but somebody also has to read the agreement. ↗

The gap he noticed was specific. Event production and ticketing were becoming more sophisticated; he believed marketing had fallen behind. Selling a ticket efficiently and persuading someone to buy one are different jobs. Kristensen had experienced the second job with his own money at stake. That gave him a useful place to begin, even if the tuition bill had been unwelcome. ↗

A small beginning, with two different skill sets

In 2015, Kristensen entered the Slingshot accelerator and met Jason MacLulich, the former chief technology officer of GoCatch. The pair brought complementary experience to the project: a promoter and marketer alongside a technology leader. Their early business was called Ticket Squad. By February 2017, it had become Audience Republic and secured a $525,000 investment round. ↗

Artesian Capital and QUT Creative Enterprise Australia participated, alongside angel investors including Ben Sharp and Hugh Stephens. The funding was intended to support customer acquisition and product development, with more attention to customer data and analytics. There was a fairly practical progression here: prove that organisers would use the service, then improve what they could learn from it. ↗

Kristensen’s ability to explain the business drew attention. In 2017, Jacanda Capital’s Rob Antulov singled him out in a discussion of investor presentations, describing him as smart and concise, with an understanding of his sector and its commercial drivers. Those are useful qualities when your audience has a cheque book and several reasons to keep it closed. ↗

The early ambition extended beyond festivals and concerts to sport, theatre and conferences. It was a broad ambition attached to a narrow problem. An organiser needs the right people to arrive, in sufficient numbers, at a particular time. A beautifully designed checkout cannot rescue an event that too few people want, remember or feel ready to attend. ↗

The friend who makes the sale

At the centre of Kristensen’s product thinking was word of mouth. The software gave fans a reason to invite friends into presale registration campaigns. A referral earned points when the friend signed up; leading participants could receive rewards chosen by the organiser. The incentive might be special access or an experience associated with the artist. The social invitation did part of the selling. ↗

Audience Republic also developed partnerships with ticketing businesses. In September 2021, Event Genius and Festicket announced an integration using its audience-building tools, including presale registration and waitlists. That arrangement placed Kristensen’s approach alongside the infrastructure organisers already used. A promoter could improve the journey toward a purchase without beginning by replacing the whole ticketing operation. ↗

An early example was Rhythm and Vines. In 2017, Kristensen reported that the festival had sold a quarter of its tickets twelve months ahead, using the referral approach. The timing matters as much as the proportion. Early sales give an organiser a clearer picture of demand. They also mean fewer tickets left to sell as the event approaches. ↗

A presale announcement, in this view, serves two purposes. It opens an early buying window and creates a group of people the organiser can reach again. Kristensen’s interest lay in carrying that relationship into the general sale and future dates. The announcement becomes an opportunity to learn who is interested, rather than a brief burst of attention that disappears into yesterday’s feed. ↗

The audience behind the follower count

By 2021, he was arguing that promoters and artists had become too dependent on Facebook and Instagram. He pointed to reduced organic reach and rising advertising costs after Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change. A large following could look reassuring while offering surprisingly uncertain access to the people inside it. The number on the screen was easier to admire than to rely upon. ↗

His proposal was to develop direct ways of reaching fans, including email and SMS. He continued to regard paid advertising as part of the marketing mix; dependence on a single platform was the concern. That distinction gives the argument some practical sense. Promoters can use social networks while also building relationships that survive a change in how those networks distribute attention. ↗

Audience Republic’s fan CRM brought together information from ticketing and other systems. It let organisers group people by their purchase history, including those who attended a previous event or registered for presale access without buying. Such groups make different conversations possible. A returning customer and an interested first-timer need not receive exactly the same message. ↗

The eventual product included email, SMS, automation, audience segmentation and ways to measure marketing against actual ticket purchases. These are quiet activities compared with putting an artist on stage. Their purpose is to make the commercial work around that stage more deliberate. For Kristensen, the original empty-room problem had expanded into a question about how an organiser remembers its audience. ↗

“The problem that I was trying to solve for promoters is how hard it is to sell tickets.”Jared Kristensen, 2022

Learning to sell the thing that sells tickets

The first version was modest. In his 2023 account of the company’s beginnings, Kristensen described an early app made by a designer in Guatemala for $500. Early customers included Rhythm and Vines and Stereosonic. He recalled meeting roughly 100 investors before securing support from fifteen. The neat funding announcement came after a considerably less neat process of asking. ↗

Kristensen was also the company’s first salesperson. His later work included building a repeatable sales operation as Audience Republic expanded through Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. A founder who understands a product can personally explain it to a customer. A growing company needs more people to explain it just as clearly, without waiting for the founder to join every call. ↗

By February 2023, he described a customer base with half in North America, 35 percent in Australia and New Zealand, and the remainder elsewhere, including Europe and the Middle East. The business had raised $10 million by then. Those figures describe a particular point in the company’s development, when an idea formed in live music had become a service used across several markets. ↗

He remained connected to the practical conversation around events. In 2017, he was scheduled to lead an Electronic Music Conference panel with speakers from Eventbrite, Rhythm and Vines and event technology businesses. The range is revealing: ticketing, promotion and production all meet in the same room. Kristensen’s software occupied one part of a business whose other parts he already knew. ↗

The sale, and another beginning

AudienceView acquired Audience Republic in September 2025. The following year, AudienceView described the purchase as an expansion of its ability to connect ticketing information with audience engagement. The ownership changed; the underlying commercial problem remained recognisable. Organisations still needed to turn a purchase into a relationship that might lead someone back through the doors. ↗

AudienceView chief executive Eric White explained that marketing teams wanted easier access to box-office data. He presented the acquisition as a way to bring those functions together and connect campaigns with purchases. The rationale gives the sale a useful context. Kristensen’s business had developed a capability that a larger ticketing company wanted within its own operation. ↗

A KPMG High Growth Ventures biography describes the acquisition as an eight-figure transaction and credits Kristensen with leading a business that raised more than $10 million and reached a team of 55. The figures concern the company and its development. They place the original promoter’s experiment on a different scale from its first landing page and early investment round. ↗

In his departure announcement, Kristensen described ten years of building Audience Republic, more than 100 people hired and 65 million users reached. Those are his reported totals across the journey. He named Neuma as his next business. Beginning again after a sale has a certain comic symmetry: the experienced founder returns to the position of explaining a new name. ↗

Neuma’s public landing page calls its proposition “The intelligence that runs your company.” It invites subscriptions for early access and private updates, and links to Kristensen’s social profiles. The brief description leaves the next product at the beginning of its public story. It is a new setting for someone who has already spent years working between customer information and business decisions. ↗

The useful detail in Kristensen’s career remains the $20,000 loss. It ties the later software to an event he actually ran and a problem he actually paid for. An empty room is a severe editor: it removes the comforting theory that a good announcement guarantees a crowd. Kristensen spent the next chapter building tools for the difficult interval between announcing a show and opening its doors. ↗